In Europe a slip resistance test for flooring is prescribed by German Institute for Normalization (DIN) standard DIN 51130. A person wearing industrial-type treaded shoes walks, facing downslope, on a variable-angle ramp which has the flooring to be tested on it. The flooring is coated with motor oil. The walker (without holding the handrails) adjusts the ramp angle, several times, to the highest value he or she can walk without slipping. The test is repeated with a second walker and the results are averaged.

As in the case of tires, treads are very helpful in slippery (e.g. wet road or track) situations. Because of the heavy treads on the specified standard test shoes, the test tends to favor flooring with a raised-relief profile or otherwise very rough surface, and it is not applicable to shoes without strong treads.

The test results are classified as R9 thru R13, with R13 being the highest slip resistance (steepest ramp angle without slipping). The R9 category has minimal slip resistance, and the R13 is suitable mostly for tough industrial situations such as fish processing, mayonnaise manufacture, and (remember, it’s a German test) production of sauerkraut.

Some flooring buyers use the results of this oily slip test to infer slip resistance of water-wet flooring walked on with non-treaded or lightly-treaded shoes, which most pedestrians wear outside of the industrial workplace. However, because of the difference of this situation from the DIN test procedure, the results of DIN 51130 can be deceptive. This unfortunately can result in a slippery floor being specified for large commercial areas, resulting in bad investments, serious accidents, and personal injury lawsuits.

In most cases, a better alternative to DIN 51130 is the pendulum DCOF test, in use since 1971 and a national standard in at least 50 nations. The pendulum test uses a non-treaded rubber slider (either hard or soft rubber or both) and water as a lubricant. This is much more representative of everyday situations than is DIN 51130. Also, the pendulum test can be conducted on-site on either installed or uninstalled flooring for quality control. The DIN test can only be done in a laboratory.

Can we convert the test results from one test to the other? Not really. The graph below (from Richard Bowman of SlipBusters, Australia) shows a comparison between the tests on various glazed, porcelain, and terra cotta tiles using a hard rubber slider on the pendulum.

The graph shows that the R10 category alone covers all the pendulum classifications V thru Z (shown on the graph), and can give pendulum results anywhere between 20 and 60 British Pendulum Number (BPN, also called Pendulum Test Value, or PTV). The DIN test is unfortunately useless for predicting pendulum test results.

The variable-angle-ramp test is expensive, time-consuming, and misleading, and resources are better spent on pendulum testing.

In addition the ramp test tells nothing about the durability of slip resistance. Some flooring can lose its wet slip resistance in a matter of weeks in heavy use. This is why McDonalds Restaurants developed the Sustainable Slip Resistance test and made it part of its flooring specification for customer areas.

If a floor is slippery when wet, it can be remedied by coating it with our durable SparkleTuff™ anti-slip floor coating. This works well on both shod and barefoot areas. Cost for large areas is about $1 per square foot — cheaper than a broken hip. Looks great — no slips!